help with regular expression

Hi all, I'm trying from much days to solve a problem with a regular expression... I'm going to be crazy! I've a script that must strip a string when it find the first word containing at least 4 characters; it must print the content of the string before that word, that word, a separator and the rest of the string. I've tried with ereg whit this script (#@# is the separator): ereg( '^([^ ]{4,})(.*)$', $testo, $matches); $contents = "$matches[1]#@#$matches[2]\n"; but it is not the right script because if the strin($testo) is "the thing is" the script doesn't find nothing and doesn't print. For this example the right content of $contents must be: $contents = "the thing#@#is\n"; instead of nothing. I've tried with thousand of variant of this script but without success. have you any ideas of the right regular expression? Thanks in advance. Bye Barbara --